


Portrait of a Mad Scientist

by wakethewinds



Series: Zim Realistic AU [2]
Category: Invader Zim
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Parent Professor Membrane, Gen, Good Parent Professor Membrane, Growing Up, Mental Health Issues, Realistic, Stand Alone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:22:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29580207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wakethewinds/pseuds/wakethewinds
Summary: Melodramatic story about Professor Membrane, how he grew up, and how his family came about. Side-story to the main fic.
Series: Zim Realistic AU [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2172354
Kudos: 3





	Portrait of a Mad Scientist

**Author's Note:**

> Soundtrack: Fool's Errand, Fleet Foxes; Once in a Lifetime, Talking Heads; Gilgamesh, Sufjan Stevens.

Professor Membrane was a genius, first and foremost. As child, he knew that someday he would be a mad scientist. Even during his youth, he was brilliant and eccentric. He'd have times where he thought all things in the world, he'd have eureka after eureka and he'd scribble notes late into the night. He'd barely sleep for days on end and he'd feel tireless, the mere power of his ideas energized him. When he'd shake from exhaustion, it felt like he was trembling with electricity. But eventually the thoughts would slow, and he'd fall asleep. He'd wake to days of missed schoolwork to complete, and pages of notes- halfway illegible- of theories, mostly impossible. And he'd be reeling from the intense emotion, recovering from the shame of the things he thought and ideas he entertained, trying to forgive himself for considering the darkest sins against science, himself, and morality.

But those moments weren't entirely fruitless. When he came back to center, he'd find the grain of method in his madness. He'd research interesting topics, plan new projects, and fabricate odd inventions. He involved himself with ideas beyond his years. His teachers knew that someday he'd do something great.

But only his teachers had any sort of faith in him. Only they could see even the surface of the soul from his schoolwork. Membrane was a worryingly solitary child; he'd make friends when he was low, and after he was high they wouldn't talk to him again. He couldn't bring himself to blame them, either. He understood. He knew there was something wrong with him. So, the young Professor clung to the idea of a mad scientist even more. He daydreamed of locking himself in an ivory tower far from the rest of the world because he thought that would suit him better than an asylum or a monastery. Like the other lost children clung to Catcher in the Rye, Dracula, Dorian Gray, or Demian, Membrane clung to Frankenstein.

That feeling somewhat dissipated when he could finally leave his small town. With the challenge of a big university and the diversity of thought of a larger peer group, he could better channel that electric scholarly feeling. It felt, for a while, that he could keep a tighter hold on that little demon of a genius that sat on his shoulders.

But even here he was exceptional. Singled out as one of the top out of thousands didn't play well with his growing sense of grandeur. There were days when he felt like the world rested on his shoulders, that only he could fix whatever great problem seemed to be looming over the horizon and that he'll be the one to solve whatever theoretical quandary caught his eye in the moment. He grew to believe his own hype.

This caused one of the worst episodes of his life.

The peak began on a weekend. Membrane talked to his roommate, who would eventually become a lifelong friend, about all the things he'd been studying. And his roommate, who had only ever seen his restrained public face, quickly became washed up in the momentum. Membrane spoke about interesting information at first, he spoke it with charismatic excitement, and his roommate majored in something else, which made his speech all the more novel and interesting. It took him a while to realize that not everything Membrane talked about quite added up. Then his roommate thought that he shouldn't leave Membrane alone in their dorm that night.

When the conversation ended, as the night went on, when Membrane sat in his room, he spiraled deeper into thought. He moved past the realm of tangible into the purely theoretical, into the metaphysical, and eventually things that made sense exclusively in his own mind. He had a psychotic break. In the height of mania, he didn't even realize he left reality. He told his roommate his unhinged theories, and his roommate listened because he worried what would become of Membrane otherwise. They ended up yelling at each other as Membrane tried to explain how to divide by zero.

Every time Membrane tried to explain it, his roommate would say, "Stop! You can't divide by zero!"

"It's not that you can't, it's just that no one has figured it out yet!"

"It's basic math! It's impossible! Come on, you're too smart for this!"

"It's because I'm smart that I know this!" Membrane insisted on his groundbreaking discovery.

But his roommate saw it for what it was, a fool's errand, a star feeding a black hole. Just watching Membrane talk about it filled him with a feeling of tragic frustration, of sympathetic discomfort. He felt disappointment. "Stop it!" He snapped at his friend, tone filled with all that emotion. "You need help!"

Membrane went quiet for a second. People had told him to get help before, but never with that sort of urgency. Never with emotion other than mild concern. Those words were like cold water. Membrane felt like he woke up. He suddenly came back to reality, as if he fell and had his breath forced out. "Oh God..." He had to sit down. The realization that he'd been living in a false reality for who knows how long felt like a knife in his chest, "Oh God! What have I done? What have I been doing?"

Membrane's roommate had to step out for a second. Watching such a highly respected peer in such a profound state of breakdown unsettled him. He had to take a breath.

"Here." His roommate brought him a glass of water and sat beside him. "Sorry. I shouldn't have taken that tone with you."

"No, you're right..." Membrane spoke weakly, looking through the glass with piecing, unfocused eyes, wide with terror like Goya's painting of Saturn. Eyes of madness. "I should do something... Our university has a therapist right?"

Membrane brought his laptop, but in the state he was in, he could barely use it. His hands trembled from exhaustion and his thoughts moved too quickly for him to concentrate on getting them written down. His roommate had to type the email for him. Even after this whole ordeal, he still couldn't rest. He had to drink to be able to fall asleep.

It didn't take too long after Membrane started therapy for him to get diagnosed and prescribed. It was a frustrating process. He cycled through several medications, most of them gave him bad side-effects or allergic reactions. Even when he eventually found a mood stabilizer that worked just about as well as anyone could expect it to, it didn't make him feel much better. He felt like it dampened his creativity and dulled his emotions. He lost that feeling of eureka that brought him his best ideas, so he stopped taking it. Someday, he decided, when he did all the work he needed to do. But not yet.

But he made progress. He gained a higher level of inner understanding and learned how to manage his emotion. In consequence, after a while he could make friends for the first time in his life. Even though he exceeded his childhood expectations of utter solitude and self-confinement, he still envisioned himself as the type of man who'd be married to science.

Shortly after graduation, Membrane drank with some of his classmates. He fell into a conversation with a woman in his same major who he'd shared several classes with, but never talked to much before. He learned that she was the only other of his classmates who made it it the same PhD program.

"It must be fate!" She said.

"There's no such thing as fate.

"Well, at the very least it's good luck."

A few years later, the two of them married.

The ceremony took place shortly after completing their doctorates. They had their first child not long after. She showed Membrane emotions he'd never even dreamed about before. Despite the powerful ups and downs that were innate to his existence, he rarely cried. On the day that Gaz was born, he wept. The second one came barely a year later.

"He looks just like you." Membrane's wife told him the day Dib was born.

"You're just saying that because he's a boy."

"He has your eyes." She laughed. "We'll see who's right when he grows up."

She never saw him grow up.

Membrane raised their two children alone. He had the help of his in-laws and some close friends, but without his wife the house always felt too empty. There was always something missing. He could never feel as complete as before. It was very difficult at first, but as his children began to walk and talk, The Professor began to realize on a very deep level that they were half himself and half his wife. They were more valuable than either. With that, he could to move forward, though he could never quite move on.

He couldn't move on easily from his ambitions like he planned to in the past. He worked on the cutting-edge of world changing science. He'd tell himself that he worked for the sake of his children, that splitting so much of his attention between them and he worked to bring them a better world, to give them a nice house where they could go to a nice school and live well. But deep down he knew, in truth, he didn't want to change. He didn't want to stop playing the part of a mad scientist and leave behind the security blanket he'd built out of that since his childhood.

It wasn't good enough.

Once, when he was in the middle of talking, he suddenly noticed Dib- who usually stuck to him like a magnet and looked at him with adoration- recoiled and wore an apprehensive expression, even a little. Gaz sat near her little brother with a protective gaze. The Professor couldn't remember what he talked about, but he knew he was loud and his heart was racing. He'd exposed his children to that crazed side of himself that he never wanted them to see. He felt like Saturn, gazing at his children with an evil eye.

"I... I'm sorry." He left the room while he had a moment of sanity. Locking himself in his room, he called his old roommate in a panic.

"I've destroyed everything," Membrane gasped into his phone, "I've ruined my family! Oh God! I've done it now, I've fucked everything up!"

"Calm down," said his friend, "what happened?"

"I don't know... I was just talking to my kids and I must've been yelling. I didn't even realize it, I just... I lost control."

"You didn't do anything other than yelling, right?"

"Yes, yes, of course. But what if I didn't? What if next time-"

"That's not going to happen. Yelling isn't the worst thing you can do."

"You don't understand." Membrane held his forehead in his hand, "Dib, he looked so scared. I'm supposed to be his father, I'm supposed to make him feel safe."

"He's just a kid, he'll forget about it by tomorrow."

"What if he doesn't? He's going to hate me. He's barely started school and I've already traumatized him, I've ruined his life. She'd hate me if she could see me now. I ruined her son! She'd kill me. This shouldn't have happened, I'm a monster, I shouldn't have been born. I can't live with this..."

"Hey, calm down. We'll work this out."

Membrane's in-laws picked up the kids that night. They were kind people, the professor thought he didn't deserve them. He made a psychiatric appointment for as soon as possible and was heavily medicated by the time his kids returned. He somehow lost his drive to do his work, he didn't know if it was due to the medication or just because of his change in life. He prepared to pass a large portion of his research onto some of his peers and take on a more passive role. Many of them expressed their disappointment, and the Professor couldn't disagree. Everyone knew that if he kept going in the way he had been, the work he'd do would be invaluable and shifting gears like this would slow everything down. But he made his ultimate choice. He'd sacrifice science for his children: never again the other way around.

Still, it wasn't easy. He found it hard to communicate with his children, and sometimes feared getting too close. Especially Dib. Membrane frightened him once, he loved him too much to risk frightening him again. But as Dib grew older, the Professor realized more and more that he was the one afraid. He realized more and more that his late wife was right.

Dib had his eyes

His eyes like Saturn.

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of excessive and self-serving but my story my rules. Check out the main fic if you're interested in this sort of realistic spin on Invader Zim.


End file.
